Giulio Pedrini (p), Giovanni Bonaccolto, Fabio Aiello, Raffaele Scuderi, Vincenzo Fasone, Marina Bonaccolto-Toepfer, Vincenzo Marinello

Christina Papavasileiou

This paper provides an overview of the main indicators of sustainability and resilience that have been or can be applied to the tourism industry. The first section examines the indicators of sustainable tourism proposed by the main international organisations that have dealt with this issue. The second section carries out an analogous exercise with regard to the scientific literature, selecting those studies that have identified a wide range of indicators following a multidimensional approach. The third section provides an overview of the main resilience indicators that can be applied to the tourism industry on a spatial basis. The aim of the report is to support the creation of an original granular dataset of tourism indicators and the subsequent construction of a composite indicator to assess the resilience of tourism destinations. An empirical research agenda is then drawn up for future analysis aimed at assessing the resilience of tourism destinations and their competitiveness in times of crisis.

Christina Papavasileiou (p), Spyridon Stavropoulos

Tibor Kovács

In this study, we examine the impact of long-term industrial change on the subjective well-being in European regions. More specifically we examine how industrial development in regions has an impact on the subjective well-being of individuals, controlling for individual-level characteristics, such as occupation, age, gender, education, and marital status. We apply an ordered probit model for the analysis for a long period (1975-2023). This allows us to study the impact of long-term changes in sectoral composition, such as the rise of new industries, on the subjective well-being of the European population. For the analysis, we use microdata from the Eurobarometer complemented with regional data from Cambridge econometrics. In particular, we examine the heterogeneity in well-being changes across occupational classes.

Tibor Kovács (p), Mária Vasvári

Jan Van Der Borg

This case study explores the potential for cultural-based renewal in Kisújszállás, a small town located in the Hungarian Great Plain. The town, facing demographic decline, socio-economic challenges, and environmental constraints, is searching for sustainable development paths rooted in its unique cultural and historical identity. The objective of the research is to analyse the structural problems of the town and evaluate whether cultural assets and identity can become a viable driver for long-term renewal and resilience.
The authors employed a mixed-method approach combining quantitative and qualitative tools. A primary data source was a questionnaire survey conducted between summer 2022 and January 2023 among 21 local key actors, including public officials, entrepreneurs, cultural managers, and clergy, achieving an 81% response rate. Respondents evaluated the town’s cultural assets, municipal governance, and economic conditions using a five-point Likert scale. Supplementary data included statistical analysis from national and local sources, as well as insights from development documents and the “lived geography” methodology to assess social attitudes and identity.
Results reveal that despite a rich cultural heritage—such as the legacy of István Csukás, the legendary Hungarian poet and storyteller, the unique rice and Indian rice cultivation, and the multifunctional Vigadó Cultural Centre—Kisújszállás suffers from underfunding, weak PR and marketing, centralisation, low civic engagement, and poor entrepreneurial dynamism. Respondents particularly highlighted the low cultural demand among residents and limited use of cultural resources for economic or touristic purposes. A lack of industrial infrastructure and innovative business culture further undermines economic development.
The study concludes that while the town’s cultural assets are substantial, successful renewal requires shifting from point-based capabilities to process-oriented development. Culture should be integrated as a horizontal concept into broader urban development strategies. The authors argue that a culture-based renewal model, emphasizing identity-building, local resource mobilisation, and inclusive partnership, can strengthen social cohesion and promote long-term resilience. However, the current absence of strategic marketing, effective cooperation, and a shared vision among local stakeholders poses significant barriers.
This research underlines the importance of engaging local communities in cultural planning, enhancing visibility of local uniqueness, and combining traditional assets with contemporary cultural economy tools. Kisújszállás, positioned as the “cultural capital of Greater Cumania”, demonstrates that even in a peripheral, shrinking town, culture can be a foundation for renewal—if approached holistically, inclusively, and strategically.

Jan Van Der Borg (p)

Giulio Pedrini

The misallocation of tourism capital (overtourism and undertourism) that stems from these resources to being commons might find a possible interpretation following the innovative vision of a sustainable pace of economic development that was designed by Raworth (2017). She conceptualizes the state of the global economy comparing it to a doughnut.
Her theory can easily be declined into a vision of the development of a destination that combines both forms of unsustainable tourism development together with that of optimality in sustainability terms. The doughnut destination has, very much like the global economy, two boundaries: an external one and an internal one. The “external boundary” corresponds to the maximum tourist flow that a tourist destination can support before the impacts become unsustainable. The “internal boundary” of the donut represents the threshold below which the destination is not yet benefiting socially and economically from tourism. Sustainability according to Raworth means decisively overcoming the internal boundary, but at the same time respecting the external one. Hence, pursuing sustainable tourism development for a destination means both using tourism to “be able to satisfy the primary needs of people”, but without being so intensive "as to go beyond planetary boundaries".
The crossing of the ecological boundary presents similarities with what is known as the tourist carrying capacity or TCC (see for example Costa and Van der Borg, 1988). The exceeding of the TCC involves the emergence of a negative (environmental) damage incompatible with the sustainability of the destination. Ergo, overtourism is, therefore, to need not to overcome the external boundary of the (tourism) donut. Representing a tourist system using the metaphor of the doughnut helps to better understand the political dilemma destinations finally need to address adequately: how do you create wealth and wellbeing for the destination without harming it, and what are the real causes of unsustainable tourism.
Any other simplifying search for causes, indistinctly criticizing AIRBnB and B&Bs, low-cost airlines, greedy tourism entrepreneurs, ‘uneducated’ visitors, and powerless local politicians, often leads to a smokescreen that obscures the true, fundamental causes of unsustainable tourism development processes, and, hence, to the wrong set of tourism policies.
The iconic case of Venice helps to illustrate the way the concept of the doughnut destination may help policy makers to achieve what is called balanced tourism develepmeny.